2019 Cricket World Cup

Result

Player of the Match (Final)

Ben Stokes, England

Tournament format

A deliberately reduced 10-team field, playing a single round-robin league -- every team faced every other team once, with no groups at all -- the smallest field since 1992, before the top four advanced directly to the semi-finals and final. Co-hosted by England and Wales.

Full match archive

Every match of the 2019 tournament, not just the final — all 47 group-stage and semi-final matches, plus the final round-robin standings. See all 47 matches →

Final: match context

The 2019 Cricket World Cup final is widely regarded as the single greatest one-day international ever played: England beat New Zealand at Lord's to win their first-ever World Cup title, after the match finished tied, the resulting Super Over also finished tied, and the trophy was ultimately decided by a boundary count-back that would be scrapped by the sport's governing body within weeks of the tournament ending. New Zealand batted first and made 241 for 8 from their 50 overs, built on contributions from Henry Nicholls (55), Tom Latham (47) and captain Kane Williamson (30), with Chris Woakes and Liam Plunkett each taking 3 wickets for England. England's reply slumped to 86 for 4 before Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler rebuilt the innings with a partnership of 110, dragging England back into genuine contention. The finish then descended into pure chaos: needing 15 off the final over, Stokes struck a six, and on the third-last ball, diving to complete a second run, the ball -- thrown in from the deep -- deflected off his outstretched bat and ran away for four overthrows, extra runs that, under a strict reading of the laws, should arguably not have been awarded since the batsmen had not yet crossed at the moment of the throw, an error umpire Kumar Dharmasena later publicly acknowledged. England needed 3 off the final ball and managed only 2, leaving the match tied at 241 runs apiece -- the first tied final in the tournament's history. The match went to a Super Over to break the deadlock. England, batting first with Stokes and Buttler at the crease, scored 15 without loss; New Zealand, needing 16 to win with Martin Guptill and James Neesham batting, also reached 15, but Guptill was run out attempting a second run off the final ball, bowled by Jofra Archer -- tying the Super Over as well. With the scores level even after the tiebreaker, the pre-announced regulation awarded the title to whichever side had struck more boundaries across the match and Super Over combined: England had hit 26 to New Zealand's 17, and were declared champions on that count-back alone. The boundary-count rule was immediately and widely condemned as an arbitrary, almost accidental way to decide the sport's biggest prize, and the ICC formally abandoned the mechanism for future tournaments not long afterward. For England, the title was their first in five World Cup final appearances stretching back to 1979, a long and painful history of runner-up finishes finally broken in the most dramatic circumstances the sport had ever produced. Separately, ahead of the tournament, following the Pulwama terror attack, the Board of Control for Cricket in India lobbied the ICC to have Pakistan excluded from the competition or for the two nations' scheduled fixture to be boycotted; the ICC rejected the request and the match went ahead as originally scheduled. Australia's Mitchell Starc took a tournament-record 27 wickets across the campaign.

Sources

• Wikipedia: 2019 Cricket World Cup
• Wikipedia: 2019 Cricket World Cup final
• ESPNcricinfo